Obama And Establishment Media Call For Greenwald Arrest

Steve Watson - A second establishment media mouthpiece has called for the US government to arrest Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who broke the revelations concerning Edward Snowden’s leaks revealing the NSA’s domestic surveillance program.

New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, who usually works as a business reporter, has stated unequivocally that he’d “arrest Snowden and now I’d almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who seems to be out there, he wants to help him get to Ecuador or whatever.”

Sorkin made the comments despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Greenwald is aiding Snowden in any way. The London Guardian reporter merely facilitated Snowden’s going public by interviewing the former NSA employee.

Sorkin, a supposed journalist himself, is ludicrously suggesting that another reporter should be arrested for empathizing with a source.

When he was criticized on Twitter regarding the comments, Sorkin attempted to back track, claiming that he was just “raising other questions.”

Sorkin’s comments are even more ironic given that he has routinely been accused of buddying up with Wall Street executives to make sure their side of the story on the economic crisis is given the time of day.

Greenwald later slammed  Sorkin in a tweeted response:

This latest call for Greenwald to be arrested comes in the wake of NBC’s Meet the Press anchor David Gregory’s comments that Greenwald had “aided and abetted” Edward Snowden, asking him why he should not be charged with a crime.

In a scathing rebuke, Greenwald has stated that he believes mainstream establishment reporters are after him because they are bitter about not being able to be real journalists:

“Some of what is driving this hostility from some media figures is personal bitterness. Some of it is resentment over my having been able to break these big stories not despite, but because of, my deliberate breaching of the conventions that rule their world.

But most of it is what I have long criticized them for most: they are far more servants to political power than adversarial watchdogs over it, and what provokes their rage most is not corruption on the part of those in power (they don’t care about that) but rather those who expose that corruption, especially when the ones bringing transparency are outside of, even hostile to, their incestuous media circles.
They’re just courtiers doing what courtiers have always done: defending the royal court and attacking anyone who challenges or dissents from it. That’s how they maintain their status and access within it. That’s what courtiers to power, by definition, do.”

Obama And Republicans Surveillence Fascists Police State

Larry Johnson -  Some Republicans and Democrats are fascists. They do not give a damn about the Constitution and use the pervasive threat of fear to justify giving the Federal Government unlimited power to pry into your life. The despicable, loathsome members of Congress–McCain, Graham, Mike Rodgers and Diane Feinstein, to name a few–happily insist that allowing the government to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is a necessity because of our fear of terrorism, which Obama insisted a couple of weeks back is a receding threat.
Here’s a great explanation of the Fourth Amendment:

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The American Revolution was fought, in part, to create a system of government in which the Rule of Law would reign supreme. The rule of law is often identified with the old saying that the United States is a nation of laws and not of men. Under the rule of law, the actions of government officials are prescribed by the principles and laws that make up the U.S. legal system and do not reflect the Arbitrary whims and caprices of the government officials themselves.
A distinction is sometimes drawn between power and authority. Law enforcement officers are entrusted with the powers to conduct investigations, to make arrests, and occasionally to use lethal force in the line of duty. But these powers must be exercised within the parameters authorized by the law. Power exercised outside of these legal parameters transforms law enforcers into lawbreakers, as happened when Los Angeles police officer Laurence Powell was convicted for using excessive force against rodney king, who had been stopped for speeding. Powell repeatedly struck King with his night-stick even though King was in a submissive position, lying prone on the ground.
The Fourth Amendment was intended to create a constitutional buffer between U.S. citizens and the intimidating power of law enforcement. It has three components. First, it establishes a privacy interest by recognizing the right of U.S. citizens to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Second, it protects this privacy interest by prohibiting searches and seizures that are “unreasonable” or are not authorized by a warrant based upon probable cause. Third, it states that no warrant may be issued to a law enforcement officer unless that warrant describes with particularity “the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The Framers drafted the Fourth Amendment in response to their colonial experience with British officials, whose discretion in collecting revenues for the Crown often went unchecked. Upon a mere suspicion held by British tax collectors or their informants, colonial magistrates were compelled to issue general warrants, which permitted blanket door-to-door searches of entire neighborhoods without limitation as to person or place. The law did not require magistrates to question British officials regarding the source of their suspicion or to make other credibility determinations.
The writ of assistance was a particularly loathsome form of general warrant. The name of this writ derived from the power of British authorities to enlist local peace officers and colonial residents who might “assist” in executing a particular search. A writ of assistance lasted for the life of the king or queen under whom it was issued, and it applied to every officer and subject in the British Empire. In essence, such a writ was a license for customs officers tracking smugglers and illegally imported goods.

Shame on the neocons and other Bush cheerleaders who continue to defend using the power of the Federal Government without regard to legal constraints. Dick Cheney and enablers like John Yoo stridently insisted that waterboarding and detention without habeus corpus were okay as long as your heart was pure and your target was Al Qaeda. Of course, left unsaid, was the understanding that you had to “trust” them.
I trust none of them. Neither Democrats nor Republicans. I trust the law and the limits the Constitution imposes on what the Federal Government can do to person. I am with Rand Paul on this. He is one of the few to speak the truth consistent with the Constitution.

U.S, Intelligence Using Nine Ineternet Companies To Spy On Americans

By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras,

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.
The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

Graphic

If document requiring company to submit phone records for millions of Americans is authentic, it would be 

Timothy B. Lee

What has the government been doing? Is it legal? Does it mean some bureaucrat somewhere has heard all your phone calls? Read on to find out.

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An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.
The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”
Government officials declined to comment for this story.
Roots in the ’70s
PRISM is an heir, in one sense, to a history of intelligence alliances with as many as 100 trusted U.S. companies since the 1970s. The NSA calls these Special Source Operations, and PRISM falls under that rubric.
The Silicon Valley operation works alongside a parallel program, code-named BLARNEY, that gathers up “metadata” — address packets, device signatures and the like — as it streams past choke points along the backbone of the Internet. BLARNEY’s top-secret program summary, set down alongside a cartoon insignia of a shamrock and a leprechaun hat, describes it as “an ongoing collection program that leverages IC [intelligence community] and commercial partnerships to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks.”
But the PRISM program appears more nearly to resemble the most controversial of the warrantless surveillance orders issued by President George W. Bush after the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its history, in which President Obama presided over “exponential growth” in a program that candidate Obama criticized, shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques. The PRISM program is not a dragnet, exactly. From inside a company’s data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all.
Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”

Graphic

What has the government been doing? Is it legal? Does it mean some bureaucrat somewhere has heard all your phone calls? Read on to find out.

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Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content. That is described as “incidental,” and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially. The same math explains the aphorism, from the John Guare play, that no one is more than “six degrees of separation” from Kevin Bacon.
A ‘directive’
Formally, in exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies like Yahoo and AOL are obliged to accept a “directive” from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA. In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department authority to for a secret order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court to compel a reluctant company “to comply.”
In practice, there is room for a company to maneuver, delay or resist. When a clandestine intelligence program meets a highly regulated industry, said a lawyer with experience in bridging the gaps, neither side wants to risk a public fight. The engineering problems so immense, in systems of such complexity and frequent change, that the FBI and NSA would be hard pressed to build in back doors without active help from each company.
Apple demonstrated that resistance is possible, for reasons unknown, when it held out for more than five years after Microsoft became PRISM’s first corporate partner in May 2007. Twitter, which has cultivated a reputation for aggressive defense of its users’ privacy, is still conspicuous by its absence from the list of “private sector partners.”
“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” a company spokesman said. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data.”
Like market researchers, but with far more privileged access, collection managers in the NSA’s Special Source Operations group, which oversees the PRISM program, are drawn to the wealth of information about their subjects in online accounts. For much the same reason, civil libertarians and some ordinary users may be troubled by the menu available to analysts who hold the required clearances to “task” the PRISM system.
There has been “continued exponential growth in tasking to Facebook and Skype,” according to the 41 PRISM slides. With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an
analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s “extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services.”
According to a separate “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection,” that service can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of “audio, video, chat, and file transfers” when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms.
Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

Julie Tate and Robert O’Harrow Jr. contributed to this report.